How to Compute Like a Grad Student

Related resources

• Bridget Spitznagel's FZQ (Frequently Zephyred Questions) List
• David Rochberg's Helpful Tidbits about CMU SCS
• Clauss Strauch's slides for the 1996 Facilities intro talk (given the week after this talk)
• Facilities intro docs

Outline

• The important things
• Taking care of your body
• How to find answers or report problems
• SCS Facilities
• What's unusual at CMU SCS
• Make yourself at home (today!)
• Communicating with SCS people
• Mail handling
• Your workstation
• Setting up a home machine
• Useful local resources
• /usr/local collections
• The Reasonable Person Principle
• AFS tips
• Document editing & production
• Web stuff
• Read the Source, Luke.
• Printing

The important things

• Ask questions. (Neat thing about CMU is there are plenty of knowledgeable and helpful people around. Take advantage of that whenever you can, and be helpful yourself.)
• Do good works for the community.
• Take care of your body.
• Be a Reasonable Person.

Taking care of your body

• Tune in for Maria's RSI talk later in the IC
• See the Facilities info
• Rule #1: Take action at the first sign of pain.
• Rule #0: Take action before the first sign of pain.

How to find answers or report problems

• Check facilities documentation
• Ask your officemates.
• Zephyr (help.<something>)
• Post to newsgroup (cmu.cs.unix.forum, ...).
• Mail to help@cs (include as much detail as possible).
• Call the operator (x8-2607) for urgent problems that keep you from getting work done or also affect others.

SCS Facilities

• They've got a formidable job.
• As a rule, they're highly competent, but they don't read minds.

What's unusual at CMU SCS

• a fair amount of in-house or uncommon stuff (decreasing somewhat):
  • AFS
  • Kerberos
  • depot
  • sup
  • MMDF
  • cboards
• good facilities support: relatively uniform environment, backups, etc.
• good volunteer support (that's us!)

Make yourself at home (today!)

• Create an /afs/cs/user/<you>/.plan file. Make all your non-AFS ~/.plan files symlinks to this one. Should probably contain some of the following:
  • Position (Graduate Student), Project Affiliation
  • Addresses, Phone Numbers
  • Pointers to directions, maps...
  • Schedules (weekly, travel)
  • Latitude, Longitude
  • A short quote/joke/...
• Edit your csd entry (only readable by CS people) with

  setenv EDITOR emacs
  csd -e
  

  (Not yet available for Linux; try your ux* maildrop machine.)
• Update your office's door label (see instructions).
• Create a web home page (see instructions).
• Set up your Andrew account:
  • If you don't know your andrew userid:

    finger FirstName.LastName@andrew.cmu.edu
    

  • telnet unix23.andrew.cmu.edu (or some other smallish number)
    • password is first 8 digits of your Social Security Number (or Student ID)
  • forward mail to your cs.cmu.edu address:

    wpi
    

  • symlink to your CS .plan:

    ln -s /afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/<your_cs_userid>/.plan ~/.plan
    

  • then forget about it until you TA
• CMU.EDU name
  • make sure you have kerberos tickets, then

    telnet cmu.edu
    

    and set a CMU.EDU name for yourself. Choose carefully--you can't change it. Once it takes effect you can receive email as cmuname@cmu.edu. First.Last@cmu.edu should also work.

Communicating with SCS people

• Finding people:
  • phone program (also includes many CMU offices, local restaurants, etc.)
  • csd userid-or-name
  • finger first.last@cmu.edu
  • home page index
  • Digital Face Board (spiffy)
• Zephyr
  • messages with (sort of) instantaneous delivery, personal or broadcast
  • See zephyr introduction, complete with instructions on using the emacs zephyr-mode.
  • Facilities Zephyr documentation describes the "zwgc" zephyr reader and "zwrite" zephyr sender.
  • common local instances
  • CS broadcast zephyr culture
    • "virtual terminal room"
    • how to ask questions
    • tradition of whinging
    • when not to take things seriously
    • whom to ignore? :-)
    • don't "sign" messages
• netnews
  • newsgroups to read
  • newsreaders: trn, xrn, strn, gnus, netscape
  • how to post news
• e-mail (see below)
• telephone
  • Type "phone help", "man phones"
• drop by their office (high bandwidth, easy on the wrists, almost always okay--they'll let you know if they don't have time to talk at the moment).
• mailing lists: cs-students, cs-newstu, cs-faculty, cs-support
  • extremely low volume. consider newsgroup post instead.
  • watch your replies!
  • when sending to lists, consider doing

    To: yourself@cs.cmu.edu
    Bcc: listname@cs.cmu.edu
    

    to prevent accidental reply-to-all.
• Scheduling
  • cboards
  • ical (not many shared calendars yet, but some cboard integration)

Mail handling

• Name resolution (shared by finger, mail):
  • Darrell_Kindred@cs.cmu.edu
  • Darrell.Kindred@cs.cmu.edu
  • kindred@cs.cmu.edu
  • doorbell.cowride@cs.cmu.edu (bounces, but suggests me as nearest match)
  • dkindred@cs.cmu.edu (could become ambiguous if Melvin Dkindred joins the department)
  • dkindred+@cs.cmu.edu (guaranteed unambiguous)
  • Darrell_Kindred@cmu.edu
  • dkindred@cmu.edu (guaranteed unambiguous)
• MMDF, .maildelivery (see sample)
  • one AFS gotcha: make sure home dir and ~/.maildelivery are don't have world-writable mode bits or .maildelivery will be ignored. (Do chmod o-w ~ ~/.maildelivery to be sure.) (The mmdf mail dispatcher doesn't know that it's "really" safe because of AFS perms.)
• zephyr notification of new mail (zrcvalert)
• user+foo@cs.cmu.edu -- handy for auto-filing
• kpop, pop3 for retrieving mail from server
• mail delivery to "GP" machine (e.g. ux1.sp) vs. workstation
• mail readers:
  • VM (xemacs or emacs) -- see setup info
  • MH (cmd line, mh-e w/ xemacs/emacs, exmh, xmh)
  • GNUS (xemacs) -- (need setup instructions)
  • Netscape (see setup instructions)
  • UCB mail -- but can't do kpop/pop3, can't read MMDF format
  • elm
  • Pine (coming very soon)
  • Mac/Windows: Eudora, Netscape, etc. (see setup instructions)

Your workstation

• Unix
  • Linux
    • I plan to put some Linux-related tips here; send me mail if you have any suggestions.
    • Meanwhile, there is a lot of Linux expertise to be tapped on Zephyr.
  • getting root access (mail help@cs--don't expect much sympathy if you screw things up; don't make gratuitous configuration changes)
  • X setup (fvwm, xkeycaps, ...?)
  • to xlock or not to xlock?
  • accounts for officemates
  • if you don't like your kerberos tickets expiring, see

    /usr/local/bin/kauthd
    

• Windows NT
  • Peter Dinda has a nice new SCS NT FAQ

Setting up a home machine

• Do you want to?
• SCS dialup pools: 28.8kbps and 14.4kbps
  NEW dialup number: 268-9300 (see announcement)
• SLIP/PPP
• Linux
  • Ask on zephyr for tips.
  • Facilities x86 Linux support is Based on Red Hat Linux 4.2
• Macs: see facilities docs for off-campus Macs
• Windows 3.1/95/NT: see facilities docs, including eXpress X server
• Campers: keep an eye on modem pool usage
• rpp-dial

Useful local resources

• CMU library catalog
• LIS (library, library -v, lislook):
  • INSPEC
  • ...?
• finger coke@cs
• Harry Bovik's files
• LASER search engine for the CS Web (currently somewhat out of date)
• MOMspider (finds broken web links and other problems)
• Paul Heckbert's SCS acronym list

/usr/local collections (aka "misc collections")

• Software under /usr/local is partitioned into over 100 separate "collections".
• Some facilities-maintained, others volunteer-maintained (mostly by grad students).
• To name a few: emacs, xemacs, mosaic, purify, gnu-comp (gcc), gmake, java, sml, X11, allegro, library, less, kerberos, games, mathematica, zephyr, elm, patch, perl.
• See the software database.
• Problems? Mail to help@cs.
• Achieve fame and glory among your peers: pick up a collection in need of a maintainer, or create and maintain a new collection for your favorite tool.

The Reasonable Person Principle

• printing (covered by facilities)
• use of gp machines
• Terminal-room Software: There are public-access Mac and Windows machines around the department with licensed software (like photoshop) on them---it's not Reasonable to copy this software to your office machine---the software will detect multiple instances of itself running and the poor sod trying to use it in the terminal room will be screwed.
• modem use (cf. home machine tips)
• network (ab)use: (help+hardware will move machines, etc.)
• looking through other people's files (don't unless explicitly permitted)
• in general, tread lightly on shared resources

AFS tips

• ~/OldFiles (and /afs/cs/.BACKUP/foo/bar/baz) -- a lifesaver
• Watch out for permissions -- the mode bits are irrelevant for access ctl.
  • e.g. ~/nsmail
• suggested acl for home dir?
• reliability (do you want your main home dir in AFS?)
• tradeoffs in keeping stuff on local disk vs. AFS
• increasing your workstation's AFS cache size
• vicemon: for watching AFS activity (/afs/cs/user/jch/bin/vicemon for SunOS, AIX. Source in /afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/jch/src/vicemon.c.)
• You may want to have emacs auto-save to local disk. See the `auto-save' package in xemacs.

Document editing & production

• xemacs, emacs, framemaker, LaTeX, MS Word
• The hacking elite here tend to favor xemacs.

Web stuff

• making pages visible via www.cs.cmu.edu
• MOMspider
• available browsers and editors:
  • Netscape Navigator (netscape and netscape-beta)
  • Mosaic
  • Emacs-W3
  • lynx

Read the Source, Luke.

• finding source code for a /usr/local collection
• basic structure of /usr/local collections
• finding elusive man pages?
• BSD source code: /afs/cs/archive/bsd/
• Mach, OSF/1, AFS source code: ask help@cs for read access

Printing

• how to print slides (for B&W, print to paper, then xerox to transparency. for color, print to one of the color slide printers.)
• See the facilities printing info for available printers, etc.